Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Weather’s Too Nice For Global Warming Alarmists - Latest Headlines - Investors.com

Weather’s Too Nice For Global Warming Alarmists - Latest Headlines - Investors.com: "Environment: Sunday will be the 2,232nd consecutive day that the U.S. has gone without being hit by a major hurricane. This is a big enough deal to be covered by the mainstream media. But of course it won't be.

"Since there won't be any intense hurricanes before next summer, the record will be shattered, with the days between intense hurricane landfalls likely to exceed 2,500 days," he writes in his blog.

Why is this significant? Because the global warming alarmists have been telling us that man's carbon dioxide emissions would bring bigger storms.

On Dec. 4, a new record will be set for the number of days between landfalls of category 3 or stronger storms. The previous streak, according to Roger Pielke Jr., began on Sept. 8, 1900, and ended on Oct. 19, 1906, when the Great Galveston Hurricane hit."

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Saturday, November 26, 2011

Orgasmic spenders flirting with insolvency | debt, government, spending - Opinion - The Orange County Register

Orgasmic spenders flirting with insolvency | debt, government, spending - Opinion - The Orange County Register: "But don't worry. Aside from spending the summer negotiating a deal that increases runaway federal spending, those stingy, cheeseparing Republicans also forced the Democrats to agree to create that big ol' supercommittee that would save $1.2 trillion -- over the course of 10 years.
Anywhere else on the planet that would be a significant chunk of change. But the government of the United States is planning to spend $44 trillion in the next decade. So $1.2 trillion is about 2.7 percent. Any businessman could cut 2.7 percent from his budget in his sleep. But not congressional supercommittees of supermen with superpowers thrashing it out across the table for three months. So there will be no 2.7 percent cut."

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Fred Siegel: 'The New Tammany Hall' - WSJ.com

Fred Siegel: 'The New Tammany Hall' - WSJ.com: " "Obama's crony capitalism has been very good for New York's crony capitalism," he says. Over at Zuccotti Park, "there are a few people there who do get it, but very little of their animosity follows from this."

One can appreciate why the "we are the 99%" militants might resist Mr. Siegel's logic. He links the liberalism of the 1960s, not any excess of the free market, to today's crisis. The Great Society put the state on growth hormones. Less widely appreciated, the era gave birth to a powerful new political force, the public-sector union. For the first time in American history there was an interest dedicated wholly to lobbying for a larger government and the taxes and debt to pay for it."

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Review & Outlook: The Non-Green Jobs Boom - WSJ.com

Review & Outlook: The Non-Green Jobs Boom - WSJ.com: "The Obama Administration has managed the nearly impossible feat of turning energy policy into a money loser, pouring taxpayer dollars into green-energy busts like Solyndra. The Washington Post reported in September that Mr. Obama's $38.6 billion green loan program had created a mere 3,500 jobs over two years. He had predicted it would "save or create" 65,000.

Mr. Obama nonetheless keeps talking about "green jobs" as if repetition will conjure them. He'd do more for the economy if he dropped the ideological illusions and embraced the job-creating, wealth-producing reality of domestic fossil fuels."

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Thursday, November 24, 2011

Glenn Hubbard: It's Still Possible to Cut Spending—Here's How - WSJ.com

Glenn Hubbard: It's Still Possible to Cut Spending—Here's How - WSJ.com: "President Obama's answer is higher taxes. But he can't be serious. Just accommodating his spending plans over the next decade requires across-the-board tax increases of 20%. Over the next 25 years, taxes would need to rise across the board by 60%.

Instead, what is needed is spending reform that offers goals, specifics and ways to blend fiscal responsibility with modernizing government. "

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Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Happy Sweet Sequester’d Days - By Mark Steyn - The Corner - National Review Online

Happy Sweet Sequester’d Days - By Mark Steyn - The Corner - National Review Online: " the “automatic” sequestration cuts would over the course of ten years reduce US public debt by only $153 billion. Which boils down to about a month’s worth of the current federal deficit.

Yet even slashing a pimple’s worth of borrowing out of the great oozing mountain of pustules will prove too much for Washington."

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Saturday, November 12, 2011

Don't Stop Doubting - Latest Headlines - Investors.com

Don't Stop Doubting - Latest Headlines - Investors.com: "Judith Curry, a Georgia Tech climate researcher with more than 30 years experience who was also part of the BEST project, has said "there is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn't stopped." She looked at the same data Muller did and noted it shows global temperatures haven't increased since the late 1990s.

Now comes meteorologist Anthony Watts armed with data showing the continental U.S. has not warmed in the last 10 years, and in fact has grown cooler in the summer and colder in the winter. The numbers aren't a collection of weather forecasts from Watts, who runs the website "Watts Up With That," but data from the National Climatic Data Center.

"

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Thursday, November 3, 2011

Income Inequality Rose Most Under President Clinton - Latest Headlines - Investors.com

Income Inequality Rose Most Under President Clinton - Latest Headlines - Investors.com: "But it turns out that the rich actually got poorer under President Bush, and the income gap has been climbing under Obama.

What's more, the biggest increase in income inequality over the past three decades took place when Democrat Bill Clinton was in the White House."

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Income Inequality Rose Most Under President Clinton - Latest Headlines - Investors.com

Income Inequality Rose Most Under President Clinton - Latest Headlines - Investors.com: "But it turns out that the rich actually got poorer under President Bush, and the income gap has been climbing under Obama.

What's more, the biggest increase in income inequality over the past three decades took place when Democrat Bill Clinton was in the White House."

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Sunday, October 30, 2011

We're All Reaganites Now - WSJ.com

We're All Reaganites Now - WSJ.com: "Speaking to students at the University of Colorado's Denver campus, Mr. Obama claimed that "the reason I've been hitting the road so much is because the folks I'm talking to in cities and small towns and communities all across America, they're -- let's face it, they're making a little more sense than the folks back in Washington." It's unclear how many of the youngsters in the audience grasped the absurdity of this statement, coming from an incumbent president who has pursued the most aggressive agenda in half a century to shift power to the "folks back in Washington" and away from the folks in other cities and towns. Adding to the farcical nature of the event, Mr. Obama was there to announce yet another expansion of a federal program -- an increase in taxpayer subsidies of student loans."

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Max Boot: Obama's Tragic Iraq Withdrawal - WSJ.com

Max Boot: Obama's Tragic Iraq Withdrawal - WSJ.com: "So why was it possible for the Bush administration to reach a deal with the Iraqis but not for the Obama administration?

Quite simply it was a matter of will: President Bush really wanted to get a deal done, whereas Mr. Obama did not. Mr. Bush spoke weekly with Mr. Maliki by video teleconference. Mr. Obama had not spoken with Mr. Maliki for months before calling him in late October to announce the end of negotiations. Mr. Obama and his senior aides did not even bother to meet with Iraqi officials at the United Nations General Assembly in September."

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Review & Outlook: California's New Green Tax - WSJ.com

Review & Outlook: California's New Green Tax - WSJ.com: "The tragedy is that this economic harm is being inflicted for nothing but environmental symbolism. A single state's policies can't possibly alter the planet's temperature given the huge carbon footprint elsewhere, as even the CARB has acknowledged.

Notwithstanding their bouts of carbon imperialism (see below), even some Europeans are having cap-and-trade second thoughts. "There is a trade-off between climate-change policies and competitiveness," concludes a recent EU commission report. "Europe cannot act alone in an effort to achieve global decarbonization."

But evidently high-minded California—with 2.1 million people already out of work and with the nation's second highest jobless rate at 11.9%—will. The job cost will be paid not in the tony salons of Hollywood but in the working class neighborhoods of Torrance and Fresno."

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Crovitz: Steve Jobs's Advice for Obama - WSJ.com

Crovitz: Steve Jobs's Advice for Obama - WSJ.com: "The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done," Jobs said. "It infuriates me.""

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Jim McNerney: What Business Wants from Washington - WSJ.com

Jim McNerney: What Business Wants from Washington - WSJ.com: "No one wants to discard truly meaningful public-safety or environmental regulations. But what we face is a jobs crisis, and regulators charged with protecting the interests of the people are making worse the problem that's hurting them most. Regulatory relief in the energy sector alone could create up to two million new jobs, and we won't have to borrow a penny to pay for it.

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In the view of business, America retains tremendous strengths. But absent a clear change in course, no one should be surprised if some companies ultimately invest abroad, creating jobs beyond our borders that could have been based here. "

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Edward P. Lazear: The Euro Crisis—Doubting the 'Domino' Effect - WSJ.com

Edward P. Lazear: The Euro Crisis—Doubting the 'Domino' Effect - WSJ.com: "The cases of Estonia and Turkey attest to the effectiveness of structural change. After a significant economic contraction in 2001, Turkey embarked on a new path of rapid fiscal consolidation. By the end of 2002, growth was 6% and by 2004, 9%. Rather than slowing the economy further, government tightening was associated with strong and almost immediate growth. More recently, Estonia, which experienced almost a 20% contraction by the end of 2009, instituted fiscal reforms. Among them was a 10% reduction in government operating expenses and a flattening of the pension growth trajectory. In 2010, the year following the reforms, growth had already turned positive, to around 3%, and it is forecast to be above 6% for 2011.

These two examples, and that of our own financial crisis, suggest that fundamental problems need to be addressed early and forcefully"

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Edward P. Lazear: The Euro Crisis—Doubting the 'Domino' Effect - WSJ.com

Edward P. Lazear: The Euro Crisis—Doubting the 'Domino' Effect - WSJ.com: "After Lehman, Europeans seem to be so taken with worries of contagion that they are failing to emphasize remedies that actually have a chance of making things better. In their case, and in ours, the solution is primarily a reduction in the bloated size of government expenditures that come about by making promises that cannot be kept."

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Wednesday, October 26, 2011

God Bless You, Cardinal

The Corner - National Review Online: "In the full text, provocatively entitled “Eppur’ si muove” (after the apocryphal saying attributed to Galileo), Pell exhaustively details the scientific evidence that the consensus can’t quite account for and underscores what he calls “the climate movement’s totalitarian approach to opposing views, their demonising of successful opponents, and their opposition to the publication of opposing views, even in scientific journals.” He also notes that the economic costs associated with various climate proposals are likely to weigh heavily on the world’s most vulnerable people. “Are there any long-term benefits from the schemes to combat global warming, apart from extra tax revenues for governments and income for those devising and implementing the schemes?”"

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Yeah, I Want THIS Government to Have My Medical Health Record

Government Site Exposes Financial Info of Thousands of College Students « CBS Washington: "The personal financial details of as many as 5,000 college students were temporarily laid bare for other students to view on the Education Department’s direct loan website earlier this month, an education official testified Tuesday."

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Monday, October 24, 2011

Review & Outlook: The Post-Global Warming World - WSJ.com

Review & Outlook: The Post-Global Warming World - WSJ.com: "And so it goes with every technology that claims to promise greenhouse-gas salvation. Wind power may emit zero carbon, but windmills need up to 90% of their capacity backed up to prevent blackouts—usually with coal and gas plants. Windmills also kill a lot of birds. As for solar power, a new study from the University of Tennessee and Occupational Knowledge International finds that manufacturing the necessary lead batteries threatens to release more than 2.4 million tons of lead pollution by 2022, or one-third of today's total global lead production.

The science on climate change and man's influence on it is far from settled. The question today is whether it makes sense to combat a potential climate threat by imposing economically destructive regulations and sinking billions into failure-prone technologies that have their own environmental costs. The earnest people going to Durban next month may think so. The rest of the world is wearier and wiser."

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